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Saturday, June 16, 2012

My first birth story

Our first
son was due on 12 June, 9 days after the expected due date my husband and I were getting
pretty keen to see the wee mite! Each
day we would wait and see if this was the day and each day - nothing. I was getting a bit impatient. Getting calls
every day from anxious friends and relatives did nothing to help my mood! we
were given an inducement date of 25 June unless the baby made an earlier
appearance and told not to worry.

Both zonked out after a hard labour

I was
getting pretty restless at home and couldn’t sit still, by Sunday I was
practically pacing the house. I felt like a warthog, breathless and enraged! I
should have realised at this stage that it was a sign baby was on the move but
I just thought it was impatience from having to wait 12 days for baby to
arrive. We went to bed at about 11 and my husband drifted off to sleep almost
immediately while I was tossing and turning, I just couldn’t get comfortable. I
was also getting this cramping which was pretty sore, which meant I couldn’t
relax. At about midnight I finally clicked - baby was ready! I shook my husband awake and told him things were
starting to happen, he just looked startled at first and quite sleepy but he
got up to make me a hot water bottle and get some paracetamol for the pain.We lay in bed together for about an hour
before the contractions started to get quite painful and regular, we called the
back up midwife (my primary midwife was on her weekend off) who told us to wait
until they were 5 minutes apart and 1 minute long in duration before calling
her again.

My husband and I set about getting ready, I
think we must have both been a bit shell shocked as we had expected the baby 2
days later, we did the oddest things. Hubby
got the recycling ready while I spent a good 20 minutes looking for a hair tie.
Pretty funny in retrospect but I was
fretting at the time. I was getting more and more anxious as we seemed unable
to Sort Our Shit. Things seemed to
really get full on at this point and it was only about 40 minutes before it was
time to call our back up midwife again.
At this stage I was in a lot of pain and I felt ready to go to the
hospital but when she checked to see how dilated I was it was only 1 cm –
arrgh! I sensed she felt the visit had been a waste of time, which made me feel
a bit guilty and stressed out. I was lying on the bed moaning in pain while she
looked disapprovingly at me. She suggested I wait a few more hours and have a
bath. The bath definitely helped me cope which was a relief as I was very sore
by this stage. Finally at 5am the contractions were close enough together that
we headed to Queen Mary to have our baby.

Straight
away the backup midwife ran me a bath in the birth pool and I hopped in, while
she sat down and wrote some notes. At this stage I was already so tired that I
was falling asleep between contractions, after an hour or so in the pool she
wanted to check how dilated I was, I was pretty horrified to find I had only
come along about half a centimetre after all of that work! I discovered in
retrospect that having a bath in early labour can slow things down so my slow
progress was explained. We decided at that point to try breaking my waters, which
definitely helped as I went from about 2.5 centimetres to 4 centimetres
straight away. My pain levels also went up after having the Artificial Rupture of Membranes and I started
to feel fearful of each upcoming contraction. I was offered pethidine at this
point but turned it down because I didn’t want to have a drugged up baby. I was
using gas for each contraction which made me feel pretty out of it but
definitely helped me to cope. By 10am my midwife was back on call and she
popped in to see how I was doing, I was pretty exhausted and was disheartened
to find I was only about 6 cm along, but I kept plugging along.

My husband
was really helpful during labour making sure I remembered to keep hydrated and
use the bathroom frequently. The fact
that he kept calm and relaxed really helped me focus and keep from getting too tense.
What I didn’t know is that underneath all of his calm he was stressed out to
see me in so much pain. We also had a student midwife, and she was amazingly
helpful, especially since my midwife was overseeing another of her women in the
room down the hall and couldn’t always be with me a lot of the time.

It got to be
about 4pm and my midwife suggested I consider some different ways of coping with
the pain as I was getting exhausted and hadn’t dilated any further. She gave me
the option of Pethedine or an Epidural. We ended up deciding on an epidural as it had
less chance of affecting the baby, she got a lovely anaesthetist in who went
over all the possible side effects before asking me to sit on the edge of the
bed and curl forwards while he stuck a jolly great needle in my back. I couldn’t see it so I wasn’t bothered but my
husband went quite pale at the time. The
epidural was great at first as it allowed me to get about 45 minutes of sleep
but it wore off at about 6pm and by that stage I was fully dilated and my
midwife wanted me to push – it was agony! Pushing made the contractions much
more painful and it felt really futile as I could tell the pushing wasn’t doing
any good, my baby wasn't moving. He was a posterior presentation which meant that me lying on myback was the absolute worst positioning possible.

My midwife
wouldn’t let me use any gas so I could focus on the contractions, which was
pretty upsetting at the time, but it was the best chance of getting the baby to
move because of his positioning. He didn’t want to budge which is not a
surprise as he was having to move uphill over the lip of my pelvis. I was yelling
with each contraction because we were spine to spine and the pain was
excruciating. My midwife kept having to remind me to keep my head down and
focus the energy down but I was in so much pain during contractions I felt I
couldn’t bear to. I was quite tearful at this stage and obstetricians kept
popping their heads in to see how things were progressing, I could tell that I
was beginning to become a point of concern. Baby’s heart rate had dropped a
little and we were starting to discuss things like forceps or ventouse. I got scared,
seeing the monitor drop made me worry about my baby.

It was
decided to move forwards and help baby out things moved pretty quickly, I was warned
that a caesarean was likely before being wheeled into surgery where I was given
a spinal block. A spinal block is a very similar procedure to an epidural
except all sensation is deadened, the relief was almost instant, I was still
contracting but couldn’t feel anything at all from the chest down. There were
about 8 different people in the small room but they were all so friendly I
wasn’t too intimidated. Except for the lead obstetrician, she was brusque and
dismissive. She was so unpleasant that I must have completely blanked her
because I don’t remember her at all, but my husband did. Turns out I was lucky to have her as she was
the only obstetrician on deck that was happy to try a forceps delivery in such
a presentation. She tried to rotate baby's head with the ventouse and ease him
out but after a couple of unsuccessful tries she decided to use forceps. You could
hear the pop as the ventouse lost suction! She used the kielland forceps and
after pushing a few times our son was born! They put him on my chest straight
away but almost as quickly he was whisked away again. The cord was cut by my
husband and our baby was rushed to be checked over, I could hear his cry and he
got a 9 on his apgar which was a huge relief. Talking to my husband afterwards
he said that cutting the cord had felt so brutal he hated doing it.

Once they
moved me back to the delivery suite my wee man started nursing straight away
which was great sign. I couldn’t move because of the spinal block but I was
ecstatic to hold my baby at last!

I spent the
night gazing at him in the little plastic fish tank crib, and because I couldn’t
move the nurses had to bring him to me to feed every time he cried. I wasn’t
able to hold him even though I could see him. We were separated by a little
plastic wall. The few times he slept I wasn’t able to because I had the
morphine itches from my spinal block. My whole body was crawling and I felt vile. My husband had to
go home so I had no support and no one to talk to. I was lonely, exhausted and
I felt a bit lost. I was ravenous because I hadn’t eaten in almost 24 hours but
the small tub of apple puree I ate came back up almost immediately.

When my first visitor came in the morning I was only just able to stand, I hadn’t
showered and I was trying to negotiate breastfeeding with a canula on my arm
and one thin pillow on an uncomfy hospital chair. I was still really happy
though, I had my beautiful baby at last.

Puffy face from IV fluids and an assisted delivery

This is the
birth story I wrote a week or so after our first son was born. I went through
to edit a few bits and pieces as this was written for a parent centre leaflet
and I didn’t want to be too negative. But so much is glaringly obvious to me
now that I know what a normal physiological birth looks like. For example, I
spent most of my labour lying down or in the bath, I clock watched, I had
excessive levels of anxiety from the beginning and towards the end I gave up
and let the hospital take over. I took a very passive approach to my birth and as such I had almost every standard intervention. Interventions which are considered to be 'life saving', yet I am convinced if I had not started on that route I would have had a much more successful birth. I had an almost text book intervention cascade (except for a chemical induction) which started from something as little as AROM and gas. I was lucky to avoid a caesarean,
and I didn’t even realise it at the time. If I had known that an epidural could have affected my blood pressure and directly impacted my baby's stats, as well as preventing my posterior baby from turning I would have taken a different route. My first birth was a lesson to both of us led us to pursuing a different way the next time around.

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About Me

I am mother of two beautiful boys with a fabulous (and patient) husband. I am currently studying Naturopathy and like to think we are a healthy living family. I am really conscious of the choices we make as parents which affect our children into the future. My ideal is to have as little impact on the planet as possible as well as healthy, happy children who will be a future generation to be proud of. On a tight budget I learned to get creative! I just felt like sharing a little of what I learned...